Page 53 of Silence of Deceit
Delia. She wasalive? He tuned all his attention toward Sir. “What happened next?”
“Delia hears her name, sees Winnie n’me, and the bloke she’s arguing with limps off—” He rasped a cough and breathed deeply, wincing.
The doctor shot Hugh a vexed glare. Hugh gently lifted Sir’s head and touched the glass to his lips. The boy grimaced as he sipped slowly.
“I ain’t no baby.”
“Then stop complaining like one,” Hugh replied, overjoyed to hear Sir griping.
He scowled but went on. “Delia motions Winnie into a passageway, like she wants to tell her a secret. I’m keeping my distance, remembering you said Delia washed up in the Thames. Anyway, she tries to stab Winnie.” Sir closed his eyes again and took a few breaths. “I pushed her down, I did, but that witch moved fast. Got me before I even knew it.”
Fury roiled low in Hugh’s stomach. All this time, he and Audrey had believed Delia to be dead, a victim of murder. And yet she had tried to silence Winnie. Sir, too. And with Audrey’s vision of a woman attacking Mary Simpson, and Sir’s claim that Delia was swift with a knife, he was confident it had been her.
If the bloated corpse Constable Stevens dragged out of the river hadn’t belonged to Delia Montgomery, Hugh now had a fairly good idea who it did belong to.
“You’ve done well, Sir,” Hugh said, his throat tightening as the boy’s expression filled with delight. Though no information, however integral, was worth risking his life for. Then again, Sir had been stabbed defending Winnie. No wonder she’d brought him to the hospital herself. She owed her life to him.
“Yes, quite brave,” Basil said. Then cleared his throat at Sir’s skeptical glance. A compliment did sound a bit off coming from the valet. “Perhaps a little reckless. Edging upon stupid.”
Sir smirked, looking more comfortable with the insults.
“Just rest now,” Hugh said. “You’ll be able to go home soon. Your mother will be pleased to hear it—Davy.”
Sir opened his eyes so wide, the whites of his eyes grew. Hugh barked a laugh.
“Now listen here, Mister Hugh, I can’t have you calling me that—”
“Davy is a perfectly respectable name.”
He groaned and whined, “It what memumcalls me,” sounding more like a child than he ever had since he tried to pick Hugh’s pocket and got caught.
“Very well, very well,” Hugh said, stifling the laughter. “Sir it is. Sir David?”
“No!”
“All right, all right. Just Sir.” He forced a serious tone. “One more question. The man you saw arguing with Delia. Did you catch anything about him? A name?”
Disappointment shadowed Sir’s delight a bit. “No, and he weren’t nothin’ special; older, workhouse thin but wearing a fine suit. Bum leg. Had a face like a horse.”
The description did not sound like Warwick in the least, but it still rang a few bells. He couldn’t place why.
Hugh turned to Basil. “Stay with him. The woman, Delia, is crafty. I’ll be back soon.”
He was on the front steps to the hospital when he sorted out the description of the man Sir had seen. He’d said the man had “limped off” after talking to Delia. A bum leg. Audrey had mentioned the cane Mr. Starborough walked with that made him appear older than his years. And that he was not a handsome man. A face, long and forlorn.
His pulse ratcheted up a notch. “Hell.” Outside of Bedlam, a man had descended from the hired hack Hugh had approached. He’d had a walking stick, ostensibly, for a limp.
Esther Starborough’s husband had found his wife’s lover.
ChapterEighteen
She practically deserved the knife against her throat.
Audrey had dismissed the limping, cane-toting Mr. Starborough as a clueless, still-grieving widower, and now, she’d gone and backed into a closet that he was hiding within himself…waiting, it would seem, to wreak vengeance upon his wife’s new husband.
How incredibly stupid could she have possibly been?
“What are you doing?” she hissed to Mr. Starborough, taking his threat against the aunt and child as seriously as the she did the blade poised at her throat.
